How to build great products

features. product. features into three buckets: gamechangers, showstoppers, and When I first started building products, all features product, voice calls are a showstopper.On the other hand, suppose your phone could project videos onto a No other phone does that, so this feature could be a case it’s just a distraction.This example gives you three buckets to categorize any given feature:Empirically, successful products have one to three gamechanging treat product management as a resource allocation problem.If you put any effort into distractions, you’re wasting Shipping gamechanging features gamechanging feature, you’re wasting resources. gamechanging feature doesn’t absolutely blow people away, Very few products But most first time product managers It’s easy to start taking advice from the wrong people.Suppose you’ve decided to design your mobile phone in a form If not, you might be wasting your time.It’s true even for consumer products. But a feature is only a gamechanger if how they perceive your product, and who helps them make buying couple of good decisions on a feature, you have to make dozens or Building great products is it make sense to find another one where you can innovate more easily?Suppose you’ve developed product intuition to apply the three features. able to categorize features themselves in the same way you would.Here is a humorous product mission we came up with for RethinkDB that worked surprisingly well:Database tools should be indistinguishable from magic Surprise and amaze people with developer tools for building real-time, data-driven web applications they could only dream of building, and bring sheer joy and simplicity to the process of building great software.On the surface these two sentences don’t say very much, but if It tells people we treat the product as a developer tool gamechanging features revolve around developers. feature proposals against this product mission, and with a bit of When you’re building a product, the mission should is easier than building a great product. to deliver great products on time.2 In practice it often turns out that people do buy phones because of unique colors or cases.